Power of partnership: Five organizations come together to provide clothing for homeless kids

When five passionate organizations come together to help people in need, big things can happen. Just ask the thousands of kids who now have comfortable clothing and shoes, thanks to a massive effort by CSX along with nonprofits National Safe Place, City Year, the National FFA Organization and Dignity U Wear.

As an international transportation company with a deep understanding of logistics, bringing people together is what CSX does best. The company's longstanding commitment to social responsibility drives its support of many nonprofit groups and charitable initiatives. In this video, you'll learn about how four of those groups helped CSX improve the lives of homeless children.

Dignity U Wear provides new clothing to nonprofit agencies serving those in need, so it was a perfect fit for National Safe Place, which connects young people in crisis with safety, shelter and other forms of assistance. City Year and FFA students brought their youthful enthusiasm to help volunteers from CSX donate, sort, pack and ship thousands of new garments to 130 homeless shelters across the nation.

Each of those shelters requested specific items, requiring a lot of coordination. That's where the expertise of CSX came in. The key to planning a project of this scope is logistics, and CSX made sure each pallet of clothing and shoes went out to the right shelter with exactly the items needed. The synergy among the organizations resulted in a collaborative effort that was greater than any single group could have achieved on its own.

Learn more about how CSX is committed to actively engaging in programs and initiatives designed to make the world a better place at beyondourrails.org.

Transcript

This project is different than other projects that we've planned because we haven't had something on this scale. There are 1.6 to 2.3 million kids that would come each year. There are 250 thousand kids in this country who were trafficked sexually each year.

A lot of those kids can break away from that, and one of the first places they go to is a National Safe Place.

National Safe Place is a national non-profit organization that works to connect young people across the country who are in crisis with safety and assistance.

So the kids, they really only have their clothes on their back. So my team from City Year's Care Forces come here today, to help CSX and its partners pack 79,606 items of clothing to be sent to 130 homeless shelters all across the United States.

Dignity U Wear is a national non-profit organization. Our mission is to provide brand new clothing to men, women and children in need across the country at absolutely no cost to those recipients.

The FFA's a national organization and we focus on ag-education in the classroom. We have 579,000 members nationwide. Today, what they're doing is volunteering their time to give back to the youth across the country.

And then of course you've got the FFA students, who sort of bring that energy, their idealism and their youthfulness to be the person power to pack all the items and get them ready for shipping. They have an order sheet and each of the 130 different shelters that we're sending items to has asked for specific items of clothing. So they're gonna get those specific items of clothing, bring to the tables behind them, pack them for specific shelters and then put them on a pallet and CSX is going to arrange to have each pallet shipped to each of the individual 130 organizations.

CSX looked at this opportunity and if it required a lot of coordination but at the end of the day, that's what CSX does. We're in the logistics industry and really what we're doing here today is a good example of what CSX does everyday.

Well, this drive today is the largest distribution that we have done at Dignity U Wear. We couldn't do it without the support of partners like CSX and of course the volunteers.

We hope that this project will touch every young person that connects to Safe Place, so that could be as many as 10 and 12 thousand kids.

CSX has a long-standing relationship with National Safe Place, with City Gear, Dignity U Wear, and the Future Farmers of America.

When you bring these five organizations together, you're acting as a force multiplier with the synergistic qualities, result in far greater transformation than any one of the organizations could create on its own.

This content is presented by our sponsor, CSX, and is not subject to MNN editorial review.